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Abraham Lincoln showed the humility of a genuine patriot when he did not claim that God was on his side but prayed that he might be on God's. Over the long run, the U.S. approach to its national interest has nearly always been suffused with a highly moral tone. At times, that tone has been debased, as it was by those who saw in the Spanish-American War a crusade to "Christianize" the heathen, provide God's chosen with more markets and advance their "resistless march toward the commercial supremacy of the world." This led Andrew Carnegie, Mark Twain, ex-President Cleveland and other dissenters to denounce what they called President McKinley's "effort to extinguish the spirit of 1776." They held with Lincoln, they said, that "no man is good enough to govern another man without that man's consent." To many Americans, that was the very essence of Americanism—and, ultimately, they carried the day. The U.S. gave Cuba and the Philippines back to the people.
Rise & Decline
"The office of America is to liberate," said Emerson, "to abolish kingcraft, priestcraft, caste, monopoly, to pull down the gallows, to burn up the bloody statute-book, to take in the immigrant, to open the doors of the sea and the fields of the earth." No nation has ever undertaken a similar task, and it is hardly surprising that the American path has often been strewn with monumental confusions as well as good intentions. Wilsonian idealism did not make the world safe for democracy in World War I; it wound up driving disillusioned Americans into an isolationism that probably helped pave the way for World War II.
That war brought, perhaps, the greatest wave of patriotism in U.S. history. Fix the hour at 6 p.m., Dec. 7, 1941. It was an hour of intense feeling for country, outrage at the shedding of American blood, a sense of common danger, resolve to defeat the enemy. A people that had been divided hours before was mobilized by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor; millions shifted from self-interest to self-sacrifice. In the wake of World War II cams a subtle and complex act of patriotism, the Marshall Plan, embodying not only the best of American ideals but also the wisest of American self-interest. In its wake also came a minority phenomenon that has recurred in the U.S. and other nations throughout history: superpatriotism. The post-World War II variety, with its aspects of stupidity and neuroticism, was personified by Joe McCarthy.